Priyanka Mehta

Priyanka Mehta graduated from Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi with a B.A. (Honors) in psychology.

She has worked with underprivileged kids delivering specialized curriculum that focuses on integrating dance, music, theater, arts & crafts, sports, and public speaking with the school curriculum in low income schools.

Her penchant for social research drove her to do a project on healthcare in rural India under Member of Parliament (MP) Jyotiraditya Madhavrao.

Priyanka is also passionate about yoga and is a certified yoga teacher. She has a “go-getter” attitude and enjoys outdoor activities, including hiking, camping, and diving.

Benjamin P. Stern

Benjamin P. Stern is the founder and CEO of IvyAchievement. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School and worked at two major law firms, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York and Palo Alto. At Yale, he was Senior Submissions Editor of the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law & Ethics and an Editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Technology. Benjamin received his undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering at Columbia University, where he was named to the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society. At Columbia, he was a copy editor at the Columbia Daily Spectator and the Executive Editor of the Triple Helix: International Journal of Science, Society & Law.

Benjamin has an eye for detail and is a “straight talker.” He believes in honest, constructive feedback and invented IvyAchievement’s Four Point Review.

Angela Conley

Angela Conley has served as Assistant Director of Admission at MIT and reviewed applications for Cornell University as an Admissions Counselor. She has served as Residence Director and Assistant Dean at Barnard College, and Director of Student Activities at Sarah Lawrence College. Angela has worked in private consulting for individuals and non-profits, helping underprivileged children get into their dream schools. Angela recently returned from a three-year stint in China, where she worked for a major college counseling firm.

Gregg Prigerson

Gregg Prigerson recently served as Assistant Director of Admission at Stanford University, where he was responsible for reviewing all applications from the New York and New Jersey, and assisted with review of applications from students in other areas in the United States and from international students. Gregg has also served as Assistant Director at the admissions offices of Auburn University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Miami. He has served as Director of College Counseling for a prep school with a large boarding and international population, where he was responsible for counseling over 250 students in grades 9-12.

Gregg is passionate about helping students find the best fit for their college matriculation. He knows all the ins and out of the college admissions process and financial aid; he is a member of the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the Overseas Association for College Admission Counseling. Gregg is an avid tennis fan and player.

Maya Suraj

Maya Suraj is IvyAchievement’s graduate school admissions expert. She has previously served as Director of Graduate Admissions and Enrollment at Johns Hopkins University, Associate Director of Recruitment and Enrollment at University of Chicago, Director of Graduate Admission at Illinois Institute of Technology, and an International Admissions Counselor & Advisor at Kendall College. Maya received her B.S. from Western Michigan University and her M.P.A. from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Nora Boxer

Nora Boxer is a writer, editor, and creative writing teacher. Her fiction received the 2010 Keene Prize for Literature, and her poetry is widely published in literary journals. Her 11 years of editorial experience are varied, and include editing a magazine, manuscripts for a publishing house, textbooks, and a literary journal.

Nora currently teaches creative writing workshops to adult learners at City College of San Francisco. She has also worked as a writer in the schools, teaching creative writing as an invited guest in fourth through eighth-grade classrooms. She has an M.A. in fiction from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brown University.

Some of the things she loves are artist residency programs, New Mexico, Hawaii, living on a hill at the wild edge of Berkeley, and cats.

Arielle Time Burstein

Arielle Time Burstein graduated Barnard College of Columbia University with a BA in Film Studies and concentration in Creative Writing. In addition to working as a college admissions consultant, Arielle also specializes in resume consultation and design for job applications. She has helped get students into schools such as Stanford, UCLA, Boston University, NYU, Barnard College, and many more. She is currently in the process of applying for law school and hopes to pursue a career in civil rights and humanitarian law.

Arielle has also worked with Animal Planet and Investigation Discovery, and she worked on production of the recent blockbuster thriller, The Girl on the Train. During her free time, she takes Storytelling classes at The Magnet, and she is preparing her first solo show. She loves watching TV and has a passion for podcasts.

Mike Disman

Mike Disman is a writer and editor from the suburbs of Philadelphia. He is a graduate of Emerson College with a degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing and a focus on creative writing. During his time at Emerson, he covered the Occupy Boston movement for the school’s newspaper, The Berkeley Beacon, and created and hosted his own radio show, The Spirit of Radio, on one of Emerson’s two radio stations. He has been refining his editing experience for years both inside and outside of the classroom, and recently helped edit a published book of poetry.

In his spare time, Mike enjoys writing short fiction, personal essays, and prose poems, as well as tussling with Russian novelists and exploring nature.

Rachael Drew

Rachael Drew is a Masters graduate in Global and International Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara, with a focus on postcolonial education curriculum. Her academic passion is culturally relevant syllabi material in history, social studies, and literature courses. She holds two BA degrees in Political Science and Global Studies from California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, CA.

With over 4 years as a writing consultant, Rachael has tutored international, adult, and undergraduate students in all aspects of the writing process, including brainstorming, thesis statements, flow, voice, grammar, organization, citation styles, and more. She strongly believes that writing is a personal process that requires work and reflection- writing is a living process of ideas and structure. She also believes that everyone has the ability to write, and feels a sense of purpose relaying this concept to students.

Jacob Edson

Jacob Edson is a writer, scholar, editor, and tutor in eastern Massachusetts, where he teaches writing, English as a Second Language, and religious history. He holds a Master’s degree in Late Antique Christianity from Harvard, and a Bachelor’s in Religion and History from the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

An avid reader and compulsive writer, he habitually juggles multiple ongoing projects, which currently include independent research into ancient monastic communities and curating a forthcoming blog on religion in the arts and entertainment. His work was recently featured in Harvard Divinity School’s Journal of Comparative Theology.

In addition to his academic and creative interests, Jacob enjoys exploring the landscape and natural history of his native New England.

Anna del Gaizo

Anna del Gaizo is a freelance writer and native New Yorker. Anna graduated summa cum laude from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a focus on creative writing and literature, during which she also served as an editor at The New York Observer. Her work has been published on Jezebel.com and Broadly.com, among others, and she has contributed to ELLE, Nylon, and Self-Services magazines. As a consultant and administrator for Bloomberg Philanthropies for several years, she led a number of multi-million-dollar grants, specifically for major employment and education initiatives in several African countries.

Anna’s passion for helping others find their voice and express themselves through the written word and in turn, construct the ideal essay, far surpasses her appreciation of fashion and more lighthearted pursuits (she moonlights as a fashion stylist). She takes immense pride in showing how satisfying writing can be to those who might initially feel otherwise and loves the unique and personal experience of working one-on-one with students.

Katherine Haegele

Katherine Haegele is a writer and editor from Philadelphia. She has published two books of creative nonfiction with a small press publisher and has a third one forthcoming in 2017. For more than fifteen years she has worked as a freelance journalist and book critic, and has published her work in major U.S. magazines and newspapers, including the Utne Reader, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Miami Herald, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. She also works as an editor for a large educational website, fact-checking and editing lessons before they are published.

Katherine earned a B.A. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania and now works as an annotator at the Linguistic Data Consortium, where linguists and computer programmers develop language-based technologies.

In her spare time, she serves on the board of The Soapbox Community Print Shop & Zine Library, a nonprofit organization that provides resources, equipment, and instruction in printing and book-binding. A passionate creator of zines, Katherine’s handmade publications are archived in public and academic libraries and have been exhibited in galleries around the world.

Prarthana Jayaram

Prarthana Jayaram is a writer and editor from Portland, OR. She has been honing her skills for many years, working in the nonprofit sector as a grant-writer and communications specialist, as well as in the media as a freelance journalist and editor. Her interests and expertise include food and the restaurant industry, fitness, and education — but her greatest passions are language and grammar.

Prarthana holds a masters degree in data journalism from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor’s in English literature from Haverford College in Pennsylvania.

Kristen Kapfer

Kristen Kapfer is an international academic editor who helps unriddle problems in dissertations, theses, and journal articles from around the world and in a broad range of fields. She is also a local writer coach for university and school-age students of many different backgrounds and abilities. Kristen moved as a child to German Switzerland and grew up Swiss, returning stateside to receive her B.A. from the University of Washington. Kristen also holds an M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed her Ph.D. in Medieval Studies at Duke University. Bilingual and bicultural, she is familiar with the many awkward challenges of second language acquisition and works often with non-native and multilingual writers in English.

Kristen’s editing is perceptive and respectful of the author’s voice, an approach seasoned by years of close work with writers of all shapes and sizes. The hurdles that make up the writing process are normal and can be worked through together, as a team.

Ariel Schwartz

Ariel Schwartz is a writer, editor, scholar, and teacher in Chicago. Through the support of a fellowship from the American Association of University Women, she recently completed her Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Northwestern University. Ariel also holds an M.A. in Religious Studies from Northwestern, a B.A. in Religion from Barnard College of Columbia University, and a B.A. in Hebrew Bible from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. She has published an encyclopedia article and academic book reviews and is at work on two academic articles based on her dissertation research. Her current book project examines the impact of hate crimes on religious minority communities in the United States.

Ariel has more than 15 years of editing and teaching experience, working with students of all ages from around the world, including New York, Chicago, and Mumbai. She especially enjoys helping Northwestern University and Lake Forest College undergraduates with their writing. She has worked as a dissertation editor and a freelance copy editor, and she served as the associate copy editor of the Columbia Daily Spectator during college.

Ariel loves travel adventures like white-water rafting in Costa Rica and bungee-jumping in Nepal. She is an avid reader and a coffee connoisseur; she enjoys doing both at once.

Tanya Shaffer

Tanya Shaffer is a freelance author and playwright living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her critically acclaimed travel memoir, Somebody’s Heart is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa (Vintage), was chosen by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the Best Books of the Year and profiled in Vogue and USA Today. Her stories and essays have appeared on Salon.com and in numerous anthologies; her plays have been produced by several repertory theaters and have toured to more than 40 cities across the United States and Canada. She has also co-written two shows for the Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe. Her solo show, Let My Enemy Live Long!, was awarded a Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award for solo performance. Tanya recently completed a four-year residency with the Playwrights Foundation, where she taught writing courses and had an opportunity to critique many students’ work. She enjoys working with other writers to help them present their ideas in the clearest, most engaging form possible. Tanya is a proud graduate of the Oberlin College creative writing program. Learn more on her website!

Deborah Skolnik

Deborah Skolnik is a writer, editor, and content manager in Scarsdale, New York. After graduating magna cum laude in English from Cornell University, she began a publishing career that to date has spanned more than 25 years. She has held senior editorial positions at some of America’s most respected titles, including Woman’s Day magazine, Parents magazine, and The New York Daily News. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, and other iconic publications.

Deborah’s love of writing extends far beyond essays. She is also an award-winning reporter, biographer, and entertainment writer, and her work in these genres has been featured everywhere from Glamour magazine to CNN.com. In addition, she is a humorist and poet. Her poetry book 100 Days of Gentle Scarsdale Satire was published in 2015.

Deborah, a mother of two, loves gardening, swimming, and above all, working with people and their words. With gentle encouragement and attention to detail, she helps writers craft sparkling, standout prose.

Autumn Stephens

Autumn Stephens is the author of eight nonfiction books, editor of two anthologies, and former co-editor of the East Bay Monthly, a regional general interest magazine in the San Francisco Bay Area. Autumn has extensive experience as a private writing teacher and has worked for many years as a college essay reviewer and editor for a California test-prep service. She enjoys helping students identify and logically develop the main point of an essay, as well as encouraging them to dive deeper and convey a sense of the real person behind the writing.

Most recently, Autumn served as content manager for an educational startup delivering SAT and ACT test prep materials via smartphone app. She has also published journalism, essays, and book reviews in numerous publications including The New York Times (where she was the second-ever Modern Love columnist) and the San Francisco Chronicle. She graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Creative Writing and studied Mass Communication as a graduate student at Boston University.

Autumn lives in Berkeley, CA, just a few blocks from the UC Berkeley campus. Besides writing and editing, her passions include yoga, getting together with friends to solve the world’s problems over coffee, and reading in bed.

Trevor Strunk

Trevor Strunk is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He focuses on 20th-Century American Literature, as well as Digital Literature and Poetic Theory. Trevor has also had almost a decade of experience teaching introductory literature courses and composition, and is an accomplished reviewer of student writing.

Zach Strassburger

Zach Strassburger is a lawyer and academic based in rural Minnesota. Zach graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wesleyan University with a major in Women’s Studies, and worked at the Urban Justice Center and the Legal Aid Society of New York before attending Yale Law School. At Yale, Zach was an Articles Editor for the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism and president of Outlaws, the LGBT student group. After extensive work in the legal clinics at Yale, Zach won an Equal Justice Fellowship to represent young people with mental illness in the foster care system in Pittsburgh, PA.

Zach left legal practice to begin a career in academia as an Assistant Professor of Child Advocacy Studies at Winona State University. Zach has taught hundreds of students how to write cogent and concise arguments in the classroom and privately, and has served as an evaluator and advisor for Equal Justice Works fellowship applications for several years.

Zach is currently writing several papers for publication, including a groundbreaking study of how medical decisions are made across the United States for youth in foster care. Zach has two young children, likes to cook, and enjoys outdoor activities such as cross-country skiing and biking.

Nina Vasan, M.D.

Nina Vasan is a Resident Physician at the Stanford University Medical Center

International Interplay: The Future of Expropriation Across International Dispute Settlement, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2013)

The New Constitution of Tunisia: Choices and Decisions (2012)

Changing Face of the Law: A Global Perspective (2004)

Languages: Hindi, Bengali, French, Hocus Bogus, English

SAT: 1580/1600 (2380/2400)

Stephanie H. Lee

Former associate, Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz

J.D., Yale Law School

Editor-in-Chief, Yale Journal on Regulation

A.B., Harvard University, magna cum laude

Phi Beta Kappa, John Harvard Scholar, Detur Prize, High Honors in Social Studies and East Asian Studies

Languages: Korean, Spanish, English
SAT: 1590/1600 (2390/2400)

IvyAchievement has put together an unparalleled team. Our admissions counselors have served in a decision-making capacity at elite universities, and our essay specialists include award-winning fiction authors and accomplished scholars with extensive teaching experience. We know what colleges and graduate schools are looking for, and we have the skills to help you tell your story and present yourself as a qualified and distinguished candidate.

Benjamin P. Stern – Founder & CEO

Benjamin P. Stern is the founder and CEO of IvyAchievement. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School and worked at two major law firms, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York and Palo Alto. At Yale, he was Senior Submissions Editor of the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law & Ethics and an Editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Technology. Benjamin received his undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering at Columbia University, where he was named to the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society. At Columbia, he was a copy editor at the Columbia Daily Spectator and the Executive Editor of the Triple Helix: International Journal of Science, Society & Law.

Benjamin has an eye for detail and is a “straight talker.” He believes in honest, constructive feedback and invented IvyAchievement’s Four Point Review.